Another intrusive database
As if the National Identity Register (NRI) and ID card scheme wasn't intrusive enough, the Government now wants to track all 12 million children in England and Wales in a new database due to become operational in two years and expected to cost £224 million. The idea of this scheme is the surveillance of all children from birth and will include information on whether or not they eat the required five portions of fruit and vegetables each day. Experts are calling it the biggest state intrusion in history into the role of parents.
This is a separate database from the one which holds the DNA profiles of about 24,000 children and young people aged 10 to 18 despite them never having been cautioned, charged or convicted of any offence. This new children's database was announced late last year by the children's Minister Beverly Hughes on the recommendations of the report by Lord Laming on the death of Victoria Climbie. It is supposed to help protect vulnerable children but will instead intrude on family privacy and remove the confidentiality of medical and legal records. It will also be so vast that cases of neglect could well get lost in all the information thus defeating the objective.
There will also be a system of targets and performance indicators for children's development. Children's services have been told to work together to make sure that targets are met.
Child care academics, practitioners and policy experts attending a conference at the London School of Economics will express concern about how the system will work.
Dr Eileen Munro, of the LSE, said that if a child caused concern by failing to make progress towards state targets, detailed information would be gathered. That would include subjective judgments such as "Is the parent providing a positive role model?" as well as sensitive information such as a parent's mental health.
"They include consuming five portions of fruit and veg a day, which I am baffled how they will measure," she said. "The country is moving from 'parents are free to bring children up as they think best as long as they are not abusive or neglectful' to a more coercive 'parents must bring children up to conform to the state's views of what is best'."
The Children Act 2004 gave the Government the powers to create the database.
Experts fear that genuine cases of neglect will be missed in the mass of detail.
"When you are looking for a needle in a haystack, is it necessary to keep building bigger haystacks?" said Jonathan Bamford, the assistant commissioner at the Information Commissioner's office, which promotes access to official information and the protection of personal information.
Keeping check on 11 million or 12 million children, when the justification for the database was that three or four million were in some way "at risk", was "not proportionate", he said.
"The cause for concern indicator against a child's record is expressed in very broad language. For example, it could be cause for concern that a child is not progressing well towards his or her French GCSE."
With the Government's less than brilliant record with computer systems, I wonder how long it will be before this latest intrusive project goes expensively pear-shaped.
It seens clear to me that
It seens clear to me that this one has pear-shapedness built in. This statement, (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wms/?id=2006-04-26a.42WS.1) by Beverley Hughes in April, concludes with the following:
"Where consent is given to record practitioner details for the sensitive service on the index, the child's index record will indicate to other practitioners that an unspecified, sensitive service is working with the child. On-line access to the sensitive service practitioner's name and contact details will be restricted to index management teams. A practitioner who wanted to contact the specialist service about the child would make a case to the index management team who would, as appropriate, broker contact with the sensitive services practitioner."
OK, so imagine you're a practitioner looking up a child's record. If there's nothing flagged it doesn't MEAN that there aren't other services working with the child, it might just mean they've witheld consent. If they've GIVEN consent you know there's something there, but it could be anything, you don't know what it is. To find out what it is, you need to make a pitch to the management team, who may broker contact, or may not. In what timeframe, we know not.
This system is intended to make it easier for professionals to liaise in dealing with children at risk, yet here they are building fog and communications roadblocks into it as a design point. Sheesh...
30 years ago, when I was
30 years ago, when I was doing my MBA, one of the case studies we had concerned the death of an at-risk child and the total failure of the social services to act in a coordinated manner. Every similar instance since then, the conclusions have been the same. To me, this new system seems only to compound the problem, adding yet more layers of "management" and creating more opportunities for fuck-ups. As for the information that is going to be recorded, 99% of it will be totally unnecessary and irrelevant and a bureaucratic intrusion on family life.
However, the magic word is "targets" dontchaknow.
Pissup in a brewery time
Pissup in a brewery time again , I see.
The perfidious French have a system for computerised unemployment claims that works. You can call from home, confirm that you have a class2 disability status still, and remain officially unemployed.
If you forget to confirm, a computer-generated call reminds you.
I will check with a friend in the Child Abuse judicial system to see how it is done here.
Probably the Blairgov "ideas" are good ones, but putting them into practice, their way, will not work.
Incremental improvements, led by those who know what they are talking about, will work.
I actually worked on this
I actually worked on this project at Tameside Council from 2004 to 24 Dec 2005. I'm not sure what the current state of play is, as I've done several other contracts since, but back then the big plan was for each local authority in the country to develop their own Information Referals Tracking (IRT) system. We did not liaise with any other authorities to see what they were doing, not even the neighbouring ones. There was no scope for tracking kids moving from one authority area to another. There were plans to exchange information electronically between authorities. There are over 400 authorities in the UK.
Why they didn't go for a national register at the time I do not know, but the reason that such a project will never succeed isn't down to the incompetence of the solution providers, it's the inability of the govt departments to understand exactly what it is that they want.
"This system is intended to
"This system is intended to make it easier for professionals to liaise in dealing with children at risk, yet here they are building fog and communications roadblocks into it as a design point".
It makes no sense at all if you think of it as a system intended to safeguard children. But it makes perfect sense if you think of it as a job security programme for bureaucrats.
One of the most important lessons I learned in ten years of helping to sell software tools to major corporations and government departments was that you have to "go with the grain" of institutions. There is no point selling "everyone-to-everyone" communication tools if the target organization's culture gives managers the absolute right to be gatekeepers of information. They see their power as resting on their control over information flows - so naturally no one is allowed to use the new communication tools.
On a national scale, such a Byzantine setup is a recipe for utter gridlock. Too bad if you're a child (or a taxpayer). Wonderful if you are a professional committee member looking for a lot of comfortable chairs to warm day after day.
Talking of expensive
Talking of expensive databases, you do know that Scotland already has something much like the NHS "spine" that they are trying to build in England, but won't sell it to them because of petty one-up-manship. Nice to know that that minimum £6bn has been spent in a good cause, eh?
DK
That's very interesting,
That's very interesting, combined with what else I know about Atos (the LiMA system, of which more anon). Far be it from me to suggest that a £6bn+ project is more juicy for them than a £24m project, what interests me is why this is *another* indication of devolved governments (Scotland/London) getting down to the nitty-gritty of public investment and getting, by national government standards, astonishing value for money*. The question is, why? Clearly the 'IT Contractor Bad' line is over-simplistic and the quality of the civil service/parliamentary supervision is a key factor.
* The Scottish Parliament is rather a large exception to this, but it was largely a national government idea, of course, like the Millennium Dome. I'm thinking of schemes like the various rail reopening schemes in the UK, which are entirely in Scotland or London, plus Oyster, congestion charge, London buses, Edinburgh trams etc. and there's at least one other Scottish IT scheme where modest aims and proper project management made something work. The key could well be where Number 10 or Whitehall has no power to intervene.